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Art

The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.

Stephen Ferris’s watercolor view Justicia, Granada shows the Alhambra’s Gate of Justice (Puerta de la Justicia) painted during the artist’s 1881 visit to Spain. In a letter to Sylvester R. Koehler, later Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian, Ferris, deeply moved by his experiences, observed: “‘See the Alhambra and die’ seems a very appropriate expression. I feel it and have more reverence for the Arabs [sic] art than any other school.”

Today the Gate of Justice is the main entrance to the Alhambra complex, which was completed by the Moors in the fourteenth century. The Spanish, who defeated the Moors in 1492, made later additions.

While traveling in southern Spain in the summer of 1881, Stephen Ferris drew Seville’s Torre del Oro or Golden Tower in ink. The two lower sections of the tower were built by the Moors in the thirteenth century and the top section added by the Spanish in the eighteenth. Ferris, who was interested in Moorish architecture, merely recorded the outline of the top section in dots.

Ferris painted the watercolor and graphite view of an unidentified building in Seville during his 1881 visit to southern Spain. In an enthusiastic letter to an acquaintance, Ferris described Seville: “what a picturesque city for artists every window a decoration of flowers and the people so picturesque painting cannot describe it.”

Stephen Ferris identified this unsigned watercolor as the House of Pilate (Casa de Pilatos) in Seville, Spain. The palace was built in the sixteenth century and today is the official residence of the Dukes of Medinaceli.